


The Imaginaries

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Childhood, Gen, Only Child - Freeform, Story with Meta Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-11
Updated: 2014-03-11
Packaged: 2018-01-15 08:57:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1299055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This started as an attempt to imagine what life was like for Mycroft as a young child. Current canon seems to indicate no child-friends for him for at least the first twelve or so years of his life, maybe even a bit more than that. Given the difference in ages, that means Mycroft was not just an isolated child for the first seven years of his life, he was an isolated only child. What's life like for a seven-year-old boy with no friends, no peers, no community near enough to "borrow" friends and peers from?</p><p>The thing is, once you let the imaginaries in, they seem to have minds of their own. This got both meta and a bit creepy. </p><p>It helps to be familiar with both Alice books (Wonderland and Looking Glass), with Peter Pan, with the Jungle Books and Kim, and with Mary Poppins. A hat-tip to the many before me who've seen the affinity between some of these characters and Sherlockverse...and Mycroft.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Imaginaries

“Mummy’s having a baby,” Mikey told Alice, one day, as they sat high up in the old apple tree on the back acres of the estate.

The apples there were the sweetest—golden with a pink blush, crisp, perfumed, with just enough sour to keep things interesting. Mikey knew all the apple trees on the estate, and a fair lot of those on nearby farms and cottage lots. He didn’t scrump apples: that would be stealing. But so many of the old folks were dear pets to the boy, giving him permission to raid their trees, and it wasn’t scrumping if you had permission.

“Babies are boring,” Alice said, firmly, smoothing down her blue skirt and the white apron over it. “They cry quite dreadfully, you know…though I daresay you don’t know, having not seen one. Though you’ve been one. I suppose it’s possible that you’d remember.”

“I don’t,” Mikey said. “Not really. I try, but it gets fuzzy much before three.” He reached out and picked another apple—his third that afternoon. “I remember sitting on Mummy’s lap with the letter book. I think I was very little, then. ‘A-apple-ah. Aaaaah-pple. B-baby-buh. Buh-aby. C sounds like Suh or Kuh. Ceiling, Suh. Cat, Kuh. D-dog-duh. Duh-og.’ That was when we had Checkers. Checkers was brown and white.”

“Checkers was a Cocker Spaniel,” Alice said.

“He was a good friend,” Mikey said, loyally. “I miss him.” He took a big bite of the apple. It was perfect: the flesh gave way with a brilliant snap and crunch, the scent filled his nose, the juice ran down his chin. He wiped it away primly with the back of his wrist, making sure not to dirty the cuff of his sleeve. Mummy would want him to get another day’s wear out of the shirt if he could: Mummy loathed laundry.

“Checkers couldn’t talk to you,” Alice said, with a sniff. “Or climb trees. I can climb trees.”

“Yes, but you don’t count,” Mikey said. “You cheat.”

Alice tossed her long blonde hair. “I most certainly do not. I think you’re a very rude boy…it would serve you right if you fell down the rabbit hole and ended up with the Queen of Hearts.” She gave him a narrow-eyed look and snarled, “’Off with his head!’ She’s not a very nice queen, you know. Even if you’re trying your best. If you’re a rude little boy in short pants with sticking plasters all over you, she’s twice as mean.”

Mikey considered her words. “Yes,” he said, finally, “she’s quite dreadful, really. Far worse than the Red Queen in Looking Glass, who’s just bossy, and who really helps you.”

“No one _helps_ me,” Alice said, tartly. “They just act like they might before they start making me recite. I hate reciting. Adults are forever making you recite. ‘How doth the little cauliflower become so pearly pale, and weather all the beastly rains and turn away each snail?’”

Mikey laughed. “I don’t think that’s how it goes. Isn’t it a crocodile? Or, no—I remember. It’s in the ‘Annotated.’ It’s supposed to be a busy bee. You always did mangle your recitation, didn’t you?”

“I did not,” Alice grumbled. “Just because it’s in the ‘Annotated’ doesn’t mean it’s true.”

Mikey considered arguing, but decided it would be entirely too meta. The iterative aspect of debating the validity of an annotated literary reference with the subject to which the annotated reference referred was amusing, but ultimately such self-referential loops distracted from the advantages of having imaginary friends in the first place. He did, however, make a mental note of the issue, planning to take it up with Mummy at a later time. Or, if he were feeling more whimsical, with Father. Or just pull out his Martin Gardner puzzles and his Hofstadter and think about it himself sometime when he wasn’t up an apple tree with Alice.

After all, Mummy and Father said it wasn’t nice to bore your friends, and Alice didn’t like advanced logic very much, even if her author would have. And she was very opinionated. Mikey didn’t have all that many friends, and he was smart enough to avoid offending the few he did have, even if they were imaginary. Alice was entirely too capable of getting in a snit and storming off without him, leaving him to hold up his end of conversations with no one to hold up the other end, unless he could get one of the other imaginaries to come out and play with him.

“I rather like reciting,” he said, though he knew Alice would scoff. As Alice quite liked scoffing it ought to soothe her spirits. “Mummy says it’s good for my memory. Father says it’s good for my soul. Of course, Mummy says souls are highly suspect hypothetical constructs…but I really do rather like ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus.’  Mummy says it’s mawkish, but, really, what else are they to do? Freezing and dying seems quite the logical outcome, after all.” He thought about it. “I shall teach the baby how to recite, and explain that it’s all quite sensible if it's worried about the dying part and cries. Everybody dies. Even Checkers.”

“Even Mummies and Daddies and babies,” Alice said. “Even you, if you were to jump down from here without stopping at branches along the way.”

“Which is why I’m quite careful to climb down, not jump,” Mikey said, pointedly. “You can cheat all you like. You’re entitled. I have to do it the hard way, with physics against me all the way.”

“Or on your side, if you’re suicidal,” Alice said. “It’s really just a matter of defining your goals to coincide with gravity’s whims, after all. The universe is perfectly willing to cooperate with you if you’d just make a little effort to cooperate with it. I like my way better, though.” She stepped off a branch and hovered, before drifting gracefully down toward the ground below. “See you at the bottom!”

Mikey sighed, and considered staying where he was. Alice was a bit scary, sometimes, compared to some of the other imaginaries. Most of them weren’t willing to put up with him for long, though.

At least Alice understood a bit about logic and symmetries and iterative loops—or she understood that some people found them quite fascinating. Peter Pan wanted to be thought clever, but he wasn’t particularly, and Mikey and he quarreled rather often. Mowgli just got bored and went off to play with Baloo. His author hadn’t been a mathematician and logistician.

Mikey stuffed two more apples into his pockets to eat later, then cautiously twisted to face the tree trunk and inched his wary way down. He didn’t particularly like heights. Indeed, there were many things in his world that frightened him. If he hadn’t been alone, he might have succumbed to his fears. With no one but the imaginaries to listen to his complaints, however, he’d learned to simply think things through carefully and get on with his life. So—his foot sought one branch here. He hooked his knee over another branch, there. He clutched the trunk tight in a lover’s embrace part way down, when he had to stretch out long and blind for the next-to-last branch directly below him—a broken off stump that was unsettlingly short and easy to slip off of. The final move involved hanging from the lowest branch and dropping the last foot. Mikey always did it with his heart in his throat, but he did it anyway.

“You took enough time getting down,” Alice said. “What shall you do with it, now you’ve got it?”

“Got what?”

“Time. Did you stuff it in your pockets like the apples?”

Mikey let a small smile flicker and pass. “Wish it worked that way. I’d dawdle over chores and take forever at everything. Think of all the time I’d save.”

“You’d have to store it somehow,” Alice said.

“Perhaps I’d start a time bank. Then when people saved time, they could bank it in a savings account and get quarterly interest. Say…ten percent, compounded.” He began to work out how much you’d have to bank to get a week’s holiday at year-end.

“Best get home,” Alice said. “Your mother’s going to be making tea, soon.”

“No. Bed rest,” Mikey said. “Mummy says it’s high blood pressure. She’s got to lie down as much as she can. Father’s making tea, and he’s bollocks at it. Daresay it’s scrambled egg and toast again, and he won’t start it till I get there.” He still started home, cutting across the wide green field, sticking to the narrow track made by the little roe deer that browsed the hills and thickets.

Mikey never went far from home. Mummy didn’t like it—she said much of the world was better off ignored as long as possible. More to the point, Mikey himself quite liked staying within his comfortable territory. He knew his fields, his trees, his few neighbors—all aging, now, and kind to a young boy with good mannners.

He could, he thought, teach the new baby all the best places on the estate. Well—after it was big enough, of course. When it was still little he would teach it other things. He imagined himself with a little baby on his lap, reading out “B-baby-buh.” His own little starfish hand, drawn from his memory, morphed into a new baby’s hand, grabbing at the page as the baby chanted back, “Buh-buh-buh.”

“You were quite young when you learned to read, weren’t you?” Wendy Darling said, pensively, as she walked beside him, oblivious to the high grass she waded in beside the deer track. “Really, too young, one would think.”

Mikey, who was quite used to the imaginaries appearing and disappearing and trading places with each other at his side, simply nodded. “Yes. I suppose so. Maybe. Is one or two that young?”

“I think perhaps so,” Wendy said. “At least, it seems so to me. But, then, Nana wasn’t in the best position to teach me to read, being a dog, and Mother and Father were often busy entertaining. I taught the Lost Boys as much as I could, but Neverland didn’t have many books. It’s quite odd, really—the imaginary lands seldom seem to offer very good libraries.”

“I suppose when you’re in a library, it doesn’t seem all that essential that a library be in you,” Mikey said.

Wendy laughed, merrily. She was quite good that way, Mikey thought: vastly more likely to join him in a chuckle than Alice. Indeed, Wendy was among the kindest of the imaginaries. Perhaps it came with being a mother herself, if only to Lost Boys?

“What’s it like,” he asked, shyly. “Being a mum? And a big sister?”

“Quite worrisome,” Wendy responded, soberly. “So many dangers. And if you aren’t careful and end up in a Neverland, all the proper vestiges of civilization quite disappear and you’ve got to represent all the virtues and standards yourself. Set bedtimes. Tell stories. Make sure people take their medicine and brush their teeth and wash their faces. It’s a very grave duty, being an Eldest. And,” she added, broodingly, “the littler ones quite detest you for it. I can’t tell you how much Michael and John resisted. As for how angry they were when Peter made me mum to all the Lost Boys? They were beside themselves.”

“Or at least, beside each other,” Mikey said.

She gave him a Look, half smile, half reproving. “You are a terrible tease, Mikey.”

He grinned back at her, and they walked peaceably toward the old Tudor farmhouse.

“Shall I like being a brother,” he asked, after awhile.

“It will depend,” Kim answered. The Irish-Indian boy moved in easy, measured steps beside Mycroft, on the other side from Wendy.

“They really do quite resist,” Wendy chimed in.

“It’s a matter of love,” Kim said. “You must be worthy, like my lama.”

“You must be firm,” Wendy said.

“You must teach the new baby what it is ready to learn.”

“You must never let him forget home.”

Mikey nodded.

“Teach him you are of one blood,” a voice like honey and death husked, and the other two imaginaries disappeared, leaving only black satin murder walking alongside Mycroft: Bagheera. “Teach him the old words. ‘We are of one blood, thou and I.’ Buy him with the blood of your first kill. Never let him be chained. Teach him the ways of the shadows. But most of all, teach him he is your blood, and you are his. That way, no matter what, he knows you live in him, and die in him. That is enough for little human froglets. More wisdom is beyond you.”

“Teach him the Great Game,” Kim said, returning. “Teach him to see what others ignore. Teach him to remember what’s too easily forgotten. Teach him to pay attention, and think.”

“Teach him to die,” Alice said, as she skipped backward up the deer trail, laughing.

“Teach him to live,” Bagheera reproved her. “Anyone can die. Living is harder.”

“Everyone will die,” Alice snapped back. “But no one practices ahead of time. You’d think a few rehearsals could only help, before being called to recite.” She seemed to have no need to look behind her, skipping easily down the thin little path. Imaginaries could do that sort of thing, though. They cheated all the time.

Still, Alice could be quite scary. Sometimes Mikey was sure he saw a skull out of the corner of his eye, when he played with Alice. Or blood on her mouth…or under her delicate, beautifully trimmed nails.

She seemed to catch his uneasiness, and grinned at him. “Off with his head,” she said, and disappeared like the Cheshire Cat.

“Wicked little thing,” Kim said, softly.

“Knows too much,” Bagheera countered. “Knows we all die, in the end.”

“Fairy dust,” Wendy Darling said, coming back. Her voice was sensible and no-nonsense. “Lots of fairy dust helps. And laughing. Remember, the first time that baby laughs, a fairy is born.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mikey said. But he knew the proper conventions, and didn’t add that there were no such things as fairies.

“Teach the new baby that caring is never an advantage—but always a necessity,” Mary Poppins said, tartly, as she chased away the other imaginaries. “Teach him all things end, all hearts break—but most of all, teach him to laugh as long as he can. Laugh until the wind changes.” She smiled, then, and added, “And you—always remember, an umbrella is a handy thing in a storm.” Then she hugged him tight, and kissed him, and left a mark on his forehead, because godmothers do that for their godchildren.

“She’s really a terrible beast,” Alice said, after Mary had disappeared. “You’ve no idea how powerful she is. It hardly shows, does it?”

Mikey agreed, thinking that this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Alice, for example, showed her strength far too clearly sometimes. The allusions to death were particularly heavy-handed.

He stopped at the cast iron gates of the farmhouse garden. “I think we part ways, here.”

“Quite,” Alice said. He’d never noticed her teeth were so sharp, before. “Your mother’s going into labor, you know. After this, we won’t be coming back to you anymore.  Not once your brother is born.”

“No?” He pondered that. “But I’ll still find you in books, won’t I?”

“Well. Books.” She flipped her head. “Hardly the same thing, is it?”

“No. What will it be like?”

She looked at him, then, and smiled. “You’ll be very, very lonely. There’s nothing more lonely than being alone _with_ someone.”

And then she was gone, and Mikey went in to tea, and the rest of his life.

**Author's Note:**

> Addendum/Added notes.
> 
> It occurs to me that, really, I probably ought to add some information about the Imaginaries, and about a couple of bits of dialog between Mikey and his friends.
> 
> Alice is "The" Alice of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. The "Annotated," that Mikey and Alice bicker over is the "Annotated Alice," put together by the logistician/mathematician, Martin Gardner. It's a very thorough and delightful compendium covering pretty much anything in the Alice books worthy of a footnote or a passing thought. It's also quite advanced for a seven-year-old to be reading, as are the Alice books themselves. Mycroft is reading children's classics, but on the whole he's aiming above his predicted age group. 
> 
> He also reads Martin Gardner's puzzles, which were produced as a regular column in Scientific American from 1956 to 1981. These puzzles were aimed at the predicted audience of the Scientific American: professional adults with reasonably strong math skills. I'm assuming that, while Gardner was best known to American audiences, Mycroft's mathematician mother was familiar with him, and either owned his books of puzzles herself, or obtained them for her son.
> 
> Mycroft has also entered L-space, though he's not aware of it. He's reading Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid three years prior to its actual publication. That's assuming Sherlock is the same age as Benedict Cumberbatch: this story, on that basis, takes place in '76, and Godel, Escher, Bach won't be published until '79. I considered removing it, or making Sherlock younger than Benedict C...but decided I really, really just like the idea that Mycroft has accessed the book before it was produced. 
> 
> The edgy, nasty side of Alice: one of the things actually pointed out in The Annotated Alice is that Lewis Carroll absolutely littered the two Alice books with mordant, black jokes on death and mortality, and that there's an underlying darkness about the two books that some people miss. Others catch it quite strongly, and avoid the books like the plague. I feel in between, realizing as a kid that the Alice books were much creepier than your average kiddie lit. My mom, however, did not like them at all. I had not intended Alice to get quite so creepy, but apparently "my" Mycroft was quite aware of her dark side, and brought out her worst.
> 
> Wendy Darling is from Peter Pan. She and Mycroft would have a lot to share, eventually. She's a lovely blend of adventuring girl and sensible mother hen, with her two little brothers in tow in Never Neverland. Kim is from the book of the same title, by Rudyard Kipling. I'm more than half convinced that he and the Great Game of international espionage he learns, are consciously tucked into Mycroft in the BBC production. The episode of Sherlock titled "The Great Game" covers not only a game between Sherlock and Moriarty, but is the episode that first frames Moriarty as functioning in Mycroft's world of international affairs. Kipling also supplies Bagheera, and the password/safe passage "We are of one blood, thou and I," which seems tailor made (and thus, bespoke!) for Mycroft and Sherlock.
> 
> If the only version of Mary Poppins you've encountered is the Disney version, you're missing some crucial aspects of Mary P. Reading the books is a very different experience. Mary in the books is darker, fiercer, more intimidating, more fey--and massively more powerful. Mythic figures bow down to her. The sun and the stars know her name, and are honored with her presence. She is among the greatest and most powerful beings--and, yet, she lives quite completely as a nanny, is beloved of a chimney sweep and sidewalk chalk artist, and is marvelously, delightfully vain of her looks and precise as to her clothing. It's dangerous to allow her near a plate-glass window, as she's likely to stop and preen and admire her reflection. She really is the perfect godmother for Mycroft: enormous power, enormous humility, and delightful, quixotic vanity. And an umbrella. And she comes in on the East Wind, and leaves when the wind changes...


End file.
